What is New for SEO in 2015?

Ah, January. The time of year designed to encourage us to look forward and wonder what the year will bring. The same is true for all areas of life, including SEO for us here at Elementary Digital.

2014 was pretty seismic when it came to SEO changes and the dust is still settling. However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t still time to see what the year will bring us. We’re not promising that we have a crystal ball here, but we can tell a lot of what is happening by looking at key trends. After all, Google are looking at evolution, not revolution of their current algorithm.

Here are our predictions for what SEO in 2015 will look like.

Mobile Prevalence

Another year, another New Year message about how mobile is becoming increasingly more important than desktop when it comes to search. Whether the tipping point has been reached or not, a mobile SEO strategy is of utmost importance this year. It has even been incorporated into the algorithm, with mobile-friendly sites doing better than those less easy to access from mobile devices.

In October 2014, mobile usability reports were incorporated into Google Webmaster Tools. In November, a mobile friendly tag was added to mobile search results. The additional incorporation of mobile-friendly video snippets only shows the lengths that the search engine giants are going to to get mobile at the top of Webmaster priorities.

If you’ve not really considered mobile to be important up until now, you had better start.

Content Separates from Technical

Content marketing has moved from a buzzword to its own reputable branch of marketing. Now content SEO further separates from the more technical aspects of SEO. As technical SEO becomes more difficult and takes more and more time, content-based SEO becomes even more of a clearly delineated prospect.

Questions not Keywords

Google have done away with exact match keywords in AdWords. This isn’t just to confuse marketers but to make them think about how they can answer consumer questions and not just target their keywords strings.

With voice search becoming more popular, people will be searching for more conversational terms and less in typed-out queries. SEO must reflect this change if websites want to remain relevant.

Bad SEO gets Harsher Penalties

It can take a lengthy nine months to get Google to recognise a disavow notice submitted by a webmaster after bad SEO tactics are used, which is a heck of a long time to have to wait to start receiving web traffic again. Businesses must be vigilant when considering SEO tactics that they choose safe and reputable ones.

Embracing of Social Media

Google+ was a great experiment but one that, ultimately, proved itself not quite as adept as Facebook and Twitter. Now Google have accepted this, there is more scope for Google to recognise activity on other social media platforms.

There you have it. Five key trends we think will be important in the coming year. Got any more ideas? Discuss in the comments below.